At the end of the evening, she invited David and me to tea on the following Saturday to meet the children, on whose approval it seemed my hiring would depend. The Crabtree children were every bit as smart and sweet as David had portrayed them. David introduced me to them as his special friend. As a final test I was asked to read them a chapter from a book by Edith Nesbit, their favourite author. The book was 'Five Children and It'. I answered satisfactorily all the awkward questions they asked about the period features of the book, which dates from 1902. After I had read the story, they left the room to confer, and came back with the statement that though I was not as good as David, I nevertheless met with their approval. I thought to myself that if the test had been one of cooking, I would have won the competition!
Chapter 54 David
Exminster, Bristol and Nice
Just before my appearance at the Saint John Passion in Exminster at the end of March, it was Jon's thirtieth birthday. I had bought him some more silk underpants, which he was delighted with, and a bottle of 'Storing pour homme.' I said to him "As you like it so much, I want you to wear it as well as me."
"You shouldn't have spent so much money on me," he said.
"Jon," I replied, "you are so precious to me, I would gladly spend my last penny on you! I can't envisage what life would be like without you. You make me feel so secure, so cared-for, so protected, so wanted. You give me so much pleasure when you fuck me that I can't believe that God has been so good as to give you to me. I'm glad that you're coming to Exminster with me. The Evangelist role in the Passion is so demanding that I need you there in the audience supporting me!"
Marcello had spent weeks coaching me in the Evangelist role, which was about the most exacting thing that I had ever done. Bach's Passions are not pieces of entertainment like an opera. They are acts of worship designed as offerings to God. Because of the intense religious significance of the Saint John Passion (it was written for performance on Good Friday) it was vital for me as an act of personal faith, to get it absolutely faultless as far as I could, because singing that role is participating in a direct offering to God. All went well however, and the audience seemed very pleased. But I was glad that Jon was there. I knew that I was singing for him, as well as for God. Without his presence my performance, even if musically faultless, would have been much more routine and mechanical.
We left Exminster to spend a couple of days in nearby Bristol before catching our plane to Nice. In spite of the fact that it had been the slave trade that had given Bristol its prosperity in the eighteenth century, it had, thanks primarily to another evil, the tobacco trade, retained its status as a great, wealthy and fashionable metropolis, despite being badly damaged by bombs in World War II. In the eighties of the twentieth century it was building a new prosperity, based on redevelopment of the old harbour area. Our hotel was in the fashionable and expensive area of Clifton, near to Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great suspension bridge.
The day after our arrival from Exminster, we explored the centre of Bristol and visited the cathedral, only finished in the nineteenth century and Saint Mary Redcliffe, a fantastic mediaeval masterpiece of a church, where I took a lot of photographs with the digital camera that Jon had given me for Christmas. We did not see the magnificent baroque triptych by William Hogarth that the Victorian gothicizers ripped out of the church and dumped in a now disused church elsewhere in the city. The following day was really warm, and we went for a walk on Clifton Down. Near the edge of the Down, towards the suspension bridge, we found a grassy, wooded area, sloping quite steeply down towards the gorge through which the river Avon flows towards the Bristol Channel. We sat down on the grass and I snuggled up to Jon as he lay on the ground, and began to caress his crotch. "Suck me, please, my sweet," he said.
We were well out of sight of anyone above us on the Down, so I unzipped the fly of his denims and pulled them and his briefs down to mid-thigh, to give me unimpeded access to his by now rock-hard tool, standing up at right angles to his recumbent body. I rubbed my lips in his pubic hair, and rooted around, sniffing his personal scent, which filled me with a deep feeling of love and tenderness. My mouth began to water as I started to lick the side of his cock and slowly moved my lips along its length, feeling each lump and vein before moving on to the next. When I reached the rim of the head of his circumcized man-stick, I gently ran my tongue along it. He began to grunt with pleasure. Lubricated by my now copious saliva, I engulfed the head of his cock in my mouth, but did not attempt to swallow it deeply. Instead I rubbed it with my tongue and chewed it gently with my jaws. It was totally delicious to feel the nut-shaped object in the front of my mouth, much bigger than the acorn after which it is named ('glans' is Latin for acorn) and smoother than a walnut, smooth as a giant chestnut. But the realization that this was no nut, but a living part of the man I loved, made any comparison with a dildo totally unreal.
"That is unbelievably sweet, my darling faggot-boy! See if you can make me come without me having to make any fucking movements," he said. It did not take long. A few more rubs with my tongue and a chewing movement with my jaws and he convulsed with a shout and fired two shots of man-juice deep into my mouth. I swallowed most of the delicious nectar, but spread some over my lips by licking them, so that I could return a taste of him in the prolonged kiss that I gave him as soon as his softening dick had slipped out of my mouth. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped his cock with it, before using it to wrap round his cock to prevent after-come messing up his silk briefs. I remained glued to his delicious mouth and climbed on top of him to continue the kiss. After five ecstatic minutes of mouth-to-mouth contact, I rolled off him and lay beside him as he raised his knees in the air to pull up his briefs and jeans and zip them up. I think that it was the best blow-job that I had ever given him. Strangely also considering that we were gay, it was as far as I remember, the first time that we had ever made love in the open air.
The next day we drove to Lulsgate Airport, parked the car and flew off to Nice to see Jon's mother. I could not help wondering how she would receive her newly 'married' son and his fancy-boy. In fact she welcomed us warmly, and we enjoyed a wonderful evening of home-cooked food and champagne, and we showed her our rings and the photographs of our blessing service, and even posed for a photograph of us kissing one another, which I hoped that, gay pride or not, she would NOT display in a frame for public inspection. I recoiled at the thought of an intimate moment between Jon and me being displayed to her visitors, but she assured us that it would remain in her bedroom! I suspected that this was another example of her deviance. Pictures of men kissing one another in art are basically restricted to the single dishonourable kiss with which Judas betrays his Master, not something that raises pleasant feelings. As I have recorded in these memoirs before, she was like no woman I have ever met. After a few days of Spring warmth, we returned to Camford for what would be my final term as a student.
Chapter 55 David
The audition for the singing competition
The Welsh International Singing Competition is held every five years in the small town of Llandewi Mawr in central Wales, one of the most beautiful and thinly populated parts of the principality. I had to go to Cardiff for the audition, which was held in a small BBC recording studio. Because of the male voice choir tradition in Wales, the competition was for men's voices only, although a few years later after allegations of discrimination, it was also opened to women. But in 19--, it was still men only.
I decided to go to Cardiff alone: my audition was in the morning and I would only need to spend one night out of what I still thought of as Jon's bed, although it was now our bed. We had refurnished the big bedroom in the flat, so that I now had shelf-, drawer- and wardrobe space (of which I needed less than Jon, as I had far less clothes) and the spare room was now purely for guests.
Among other entrants for the auditions were Mike and Nat, who were now in their third and final year at the Stamford School of Singing, and whom I had met the year before in the Dunchester auditions. They turned out to be staying at the same hotel as I was, and we met the night before to eat and drink together. Nat's success at Dunchester had, they told me, raised their profile at the academy, and they were no longer targets of homophobic teasing. Indeed one other pair of male students had come out as an indirect result of Nat's success.
We all had rather a lot to drink that night, partly out of high spirits, but also because we were all nervous. We did not know what to expect. Marcello had told me that he had no experience of this particular competition, so knew nothing about the audition system. However, he said, because it was a quinquennial event, its prestige was very high. I had prepared two test pieces, as the instructions told us, the aria 'Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön' from 'Die Zauberflöte' and 'Waft her, angels, through the skies' from Händel's 'Jephtha.' We also had to sightread an unseen piece.
Next morning, the programme began early and the tenors were auditioned first. Again, my surname pushed me down the alphabetical list and Mike went in before me. When he came out he told us that there were only four adjudicators, three men and a woman, none of whom he knew. He had been asked to sing one of his test pieces, and his sightreading had been a fiendishly tricky song by Roger Quilter. When my turn came, I entered the room with some trepidation. The adjudicators did nothing to set me at ease. They asked me to sightread the unseen piece first, a song 'O my blacke soule' by Benjamin Britten from his 'Holy Sonnets of John Donne.' It was not easy, but it was a nice piece. Then they asked me to sing the Mozart aria, which seemed to me to go very well. Nat's turn came in the afternoon, and he also felt that he had been put through the mill. We were all told that we would hear the result the following week, not by post but via our teachers, whose names we had had to supply on our application. In spite of our inclination to go drinking again, we all went home that evening, having exchanged phone numbers. I got a train about 6 from Cardiff and got back to Camford just before 10, having had a sandwich and a beer on the train.
